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Someone asked: Is there a way to teach math without worksheets?
Absolutely, positively, wonderfully, resoundingly, YES! (Or as my 12 yr old sitting next to me just said: "Heck yeah!")
Teaching math with worksheets is probably the most boring and uninteresting way to go about it, unless you have a kid who happens to love worksheets.
Live math. Speak math. Embrace it.
Okay, I know, that's easy for me to say, but what does it mean in practical terms?
Start with talking. You say, rightly so, that the basics of math are basic to many things, and are necessary to know. That's true. It also makes it easy to learn them. Know why? Because they *are* basic, they are everywhere.
Be aware of your language. Math is a language. Talk about things. Are you half done? Have you saved 20%? Do you have three more things to do? Do you need to find a matching pattern? If you want something that costs more than you'd usually spend, how might you cut corners elsewhere in order to save the extra money? Make this sort of discussion a constant in your home. Don't be afraid of using terminology that your children don't yet know, that's how they will learn it. Just like they learned to talk- in context, much repetition.
Play games. Math is a game. Taking turns, counting spaces, strategy, logic, design- all math. Building things. Balancing things. Color is math related. Music has LOTS of math in it (And not just rhythms, the notes themselves are mathematically based.). I think part of why people are so afraid of math is that they lack *musical* experience and education- learning to recognize patterns in music is one of the basic ways our brains learn to recognize patterns elsewhere.
Find the ways you use math every day, and share that with your kids. Do you measure? Count? Compare? Time? Make schedules? Don't make everything a lesson, make it part of *your* life, and it will become part of your child's life as well.
Play with puzzles- physical puzzles, word puzzles, logic puzzles. Math is one of the tools we use to figure stuff out- so go figure. :-)
Math should be comfortable, fun, exciting. Not dull. Not dreaded. And not difficult, either.
There are some good books out there, I'll mention a few:
Any of the math books by Marilyn Burns.
Family Math (there are three different ones now, I've only seen the original,
but bet the others are good, too)
Just about any books of logic puzzles, or the books put out by Mensa of brain
teasers and such.
Play! Really. Play some more. Read about the history of math, or about specific mathematicians. (Pythagoras and Fermat come to mind, there are lots.)
But please, whatever you do, don't limit yourself to worksheets and drill and basic "school math".